Computer Programs

Free, Retirement Planner, Social Security Planner, Return Calculator, Budgeting Planner, Allocation Control, Investment Manager, Pre & Post Retirement Planner, Convert my IRA to Roth, TIPS vs. Savings I Bonds, Replacement Budgeting, Evaluating Immediate Annuties

All of these programs require Microsoft Excel version 97 or later.

      

Free Retirement Planner

Consumer Reports rates as best of free planners

Pre & Post Retirement Planner

Comprehensive & eye opening.  (Free)

 

Free Strategic Social Security Planner Up to 76% more income with alternative strategies.

Free Return Calculator

Determines your actual returns, not what otherwise reported.

Free Budgeting Planner

Easy to use way to make an annual budget.

Free Replacement Budgeting

Save by earning interest, not paying interest.

Evaluating Immediate Annuities  Simplified (Free)

Comprehensive (Free)

Convert my IRA to a Roth?

See if this conversion to a tax free investment helps. (Free)

TIPS vs. Savings I Bonds

See which inflation-adjusted bonds are best for you. (Free)

 Estate & Investment Manager Helps manage spending, investments and estate for owner, survivor and executor.

(Free)

Retirement Investment Optimizer

Program for inflation-adjusted retirement income with less risk.

(Free)

Annual & Compound Returns Program.  See history of your returns and how they Compound over time. (Free)

Quick Retirement Analysis.  This 10 minute retirement plan ballparks your future.  It is far more realistic than most internet planners because it shows a possible range of outcomes for any stock allocation you choose both pre and post retirement.  (Free)

Professional Assistant with Autopilot II:  For professionals and advanced users who want better allocation patterns and retirement spending methods to accommodate the real world annual savings volatility. (Free)

100 years of inflation history: This includes inflation for each year as well as longer periods for a convenient data source.  (Free)

Going forward AnalyzeNow will be maintained by NewRetirement where Bud was an advisor and contributor.

NewRetirement offers two powerful tools a quick retirement calculator and the best retirement planning tool available on the internet. The information you enter reflects you, your current situation, your goals for retirement. It shows you the many different ways you can achieve those goals.

 

Read more about these programs or program of interest below.

 

Professional Assistant with Autopilot II. This computer program provides assistance with security allocations, changes in allocations as retirees age, pension or annunity choices and planning methods to advise client with projections that show real, not statistical, scenarios starting at various past times in history from 1928 up to more recent times.  Clients will be amazed at how much variability there may be in their spending through their lives.  The program includes a new concept, the Autopilot, which helps to reduce this volatility. Link to the Professional Assistant with Autopilot II program download.   (Return)     

 

Quick Retirement Analysis:  This free extraordinarily simple program for Excel does some amazing things.  It can be used both before and after retirement.  You can try different stock/bond allocations in both cases.  It's meant for those who have very little time to spend on retirement planning who would like a better idea what their current savings and deposits/withdrawals will yield in terms of annual retirement spending.  It does not include provisions for Social Security, pensions or immediate annuities as do our full planners but offers a perspective of the range of possible savings balance outcomes considering the uncertainty of future returns and inflation.  Link to Quick Retirement Analysis

 

 

Retirement Planner.   Consumer Report (Feb. 2011) rated the Retirement Planner as in the top three of free Web based planners and better than the other two for pensions.  The other two were AARP and T Rowe Price.  Now, this program has added other valuable information and has been markedly improved with better graphics and more capability.  Here are some of its features that help you do a much better job of planning than other programs:

 

It now shows what happens to the amount you can spend AFTER running out of savings.  It adds budgeting programs for both pre and post retirement.  The latter is tied to your plan and shows whether the total of your budgeted items works with your plan.

 

The program now has both pre-retirement and post-retirement budgeting programs as individual tabs. We also added a tab which has tabular data so that advanced users or professionals can make their own customized charts.

 

Link to the Retirement Planner.  There is an Optional Case tab that does some of the things included in the more comprehensive Pre and Post Retirement Planner from www.analyzenow.com.  This tab graphically displays a comparison of the base case tab with the optional case tab which can have different inputs.  So you can clearly see the difference between delaying Social Security, retiring later, saving more money, spending a different amount in retirement, etc.  

 

The Optional Case tab allows you to input your percentage allocation of stocks and fixed income investments.  Then it graphically displays what would have happened if you had retired in 1948 (the best year to retire in modern history) or 1965 (the worst year to retire in modern history).  These utilize the actual returns for the securities and inflation in each year instead of some assumed values for retirement.  You can also enter the costs of investing which often take away so much of retirees’ returns.           (Return)         

 

Pre and Post Retirement Planner, a comprehensive program for both pre and post retirement planning. 

This program is geared toward those who are serious about planning for retirement and those who are already in retirement who want a more comprehensive plan than afforded by the vast majority of Web and professional plans as well as our own Retirement Planner. It offers the capability to analyze more complex investments, tax, income or cost events. It is good at analyzing multiple real estate investments and numerous special financial events at any age in your life. It has two cases running independently and simultaneously so that you can compare different alternatives. This is a great aid when making decisions that may affect the rest of your life. Further, it displays results from three separate scenarios: Your own scenario, a second scenario in an historically bad period and a third scenario from an historically good period. You can compare these last two with your own scenario to gain some insight whether your results are optimistic or conservative by historical economic measures. This is a great program for professionals or those who need to take a hard look at their finances, especially before making a major financial commitment—like retirement, for example.

There is a greatly improved Pre and Post Retirement Planner now available.  The main additions are (1) a new Comparisons tab that allows users to make direct comparisons between two cases, and (2) a Manual tab so that those who would like more instruction can get it and print if desired. In addition to these changes, the graphics are much improved including bright red markers to show where Case 2 is different from Case 1.  And a couple of small errors were corrected.

Download Pre and Post Retirement Planner Program                    (Return)                                                                              

Download Pre and Post Retirement Planner PDF User Manual

“Should I convert my IRA to a Roth?”  Program helps answer.

An IRA conversion can be a benefit or a mistake, depending on what happens both in your future needs for money as well as what happens to inflation, tax rates and investment returns, among other things. Link to Should I convert my IRA to Roth?         (Return)     

Free Strategic Social Security Planner

 

This is a powerful and unique program that may allow you to increase Social Security payments by as much as 76%. The program allows you to compare the normal alternatives for taking Social Security with the little known File and Suspend and Suspend (only) alternatives. It also includes an accounting for pensions so that you can see both Social Security and pension income and survivor payments for each. It compares the additional savings you need to delay the start of Social Security as well as the other two alternatives. There is a direct comparison of the savings differences with the lifetime incomes from each alternative you might choose for a cost/benefit comparison.

Link to the free Strategic Social Security Planner

 

 

Estate & Investment Manager (Free).

 

This remarkable program helps you with the important things for the executor of your will (e.g., survivor income, ownership and beneficiary designations), your own investment management (e.g., asset allocation and reallocation) and getting information in the right categories for retirement planning (e.g., funds for emergency and large purchases).  It includes a ledger that allows you to see the totals of your withdrawals summed for different purposes.  Also there is an investment history log that automatically calculates what your annual return was for previous years.  Finally, it has sheets for key things such as document and valuables location, critical phone numbers, important data such as birth dates, social security numbers, personal distributions, gift tax return credits, etc.

To download this free program: Internet Explorer users right click and then select "Save Target As" from the menu. Link to Estate & Investment Manager

 

Retirement Investment Optimizer.

This program helps determine the best mix of stocks, bonds or other fixed-income investments both before and after retirement as well as the risk. It can be a big help in deciding whether it would be better to invest part of savings in a pension or annuity that has guaranteed fixed payments (some have inflation adjustments) instead of everything in a more risky mix of stocks and bonds. Further, it helps to optimize survivor benefits, something that can be very difficult after many years of varied returns and compounded inflation.

 

To download this program, click on Retirement Investment Optimizer.

Free Program to Evaluate Immediate Annuities of Various Types

If you are thinking seriously about buying an immediate annuity or converting your employee savings plan to a pension, you can use this program to determine if that is in the best interest of you and, if married, your spouse. The program lets you compare a number of types of immediate annuities including ones with fixed payments, payments that increase a certain percentage each year, and ones that increase each year with inflation. You can further compare the results with how you might do without the immediate annuity. If you have a variable annuity, you might want to consider using a 1035 tax-free exchange to get into one of the new inflation adjusted immediate annuities. The program calculates results for both qualified and non qualified accounts considering ordinary income tax and taxes on returns.

To download this free program: Internet Explorer users right click and then select "Save Target As" from the menu

Link to Evaluating Immediate Annuities - Simplified

 Link to Evaluating Immediate Annuities - Comprehensive

Free Return Calculator

This Return Calculator program is a wonderful way to find out how your investments actually performed even when you had numerous deposits and/or withdrawals during the year--not how someone would like you to believe they performed. Many financial professionals have ways of hiding costs, fees, and kickbacks that may be a serious drain on your portfolio. If so, or if you are not doing as well as some of the common market indexes, you should probably make some changes. This download is FREE. Many users have found that they can do much better using index funds from low-cost mutual fund because they have discovered the severe penalties from some excessive professional fees and hidden costs in many mutual funds.

This small (only 20 KB) program for MSExcel 97 or later may be very valuable to you. Internet Explorer users right click and then select "Save Target As" from the menu.       Link to Return Calculator

Annual & Compound Returns Program

 

This program extends the analysis in the Free Return Calculator to cover multiple years so that you can have a record of both annual and cumulative returns from compounding all of the previous annual returns.  It provides very good perspective of your investment performance. Link to Annual & Compound Returns Program

Free Budgeting Planner

This easy-to-use program helps you establish a budget that fits within your income, whether still working or already retired. It is Excel based, but you do not have to know how to use Excel to use it.

To download the free version: Internet Explorer users right click and then select "Save Target As" from the menu. Link to Free Budgeting Planner
 

Free Program to compare TIPS with I Bonds

If you are contemplating buying some government inflation-adjusted bonds, you should compare TIPS with Savings I Bonds to see which is better at the present time.  It's largely dependent of the relative value of fixed interest between the two as well as your expectations for future tax rates and inflation rates.  Link to Compare TIPS with I Bonds

Free Program for Replacement Budgeting

 By the time you get to retirement, you should not be buying items on credit.  In fact, the earlier you start saving for items before you buy them, the larger will be your retirement resources.   It just costs too much of precious resources to pay all of that interest instead of earning interest.  Use this simple calculator to show how much you should be saving each year.  Link to Replacement Budgeting program.